Brave the Tempest (Cassandra Palmer #9) - Karen Chance Page 0,147

it was in the jungle of items spread around that I was supposed to be watching. A bear with real fur and little beads for eyes watched me with distrust from a painted forest and sent three adorable cubs scrambling up a tree for protection. A school of dolphins chased each other around a dress that shimmered like sunlight on water and splashed what felt like real droplets at me as the pod raced by. Another dress boiled red and gold and black, like lava, with the “crust” on top making ever-changing patterns on the mesmerizing surface.

And then I felt something crawling up my hand.

I shook it instinctively and stumbled back, but the small creatures running up my arm didn’t come off. Which was alarming, because they looked like small golden beetles. Exactly like.

Crap!

I danced around some more, but it didn’t help. And now they were inside my tee and scurrying over my skin, and I got a sudden flashback to The Mummy and freaked the hell out. But they weren’t trying to eat me, I realized a moment later. They were trying to—

“Oh,” I said, catching a brief glimpse of myself in a mirror. But not of my messy hair. I walked over to the wall to get a better look, and yeah, that’s what I’d thought. They were styling it.

I stared at them as they scurried over my head, tossing aside my scrunchy disdainfully and working quickly to form an elaborately braided hairstyle. It was sort of a twenties bob crossed with Heidi, which they formed and then clamped off, using their bodies like jeweled hair pins to keep it all in place. It was a gorgeous updo, the sort of thing I’d never worn, and I suddenly wished I had someplace to show it off. I turned this way and that, watching the “pins” glitter and gleam. It was beautiful!

“Cassie?”

“What?”

“Do you see it?” Mircea asked, from the next room.

“See what?”

“See me,” he answered strangely—or maybe not. Because when I glanced around again, the interior of the cloak was no longer white, but looked like a TV screen, if TV screens could drape over a desk.

I moved closer and found myself looking down into a dizzying view of the bedroom. It was skewed because Mircea was holding something up at an angle—presumably the other cloak, since the view had folds in it. He threw it over the bed after a moment, and the room skewed even more, showing me a flash of the open bathroom door, the wall, and, finally, the ceiling.

“Do you see?” he asked again.

“I see the bedroom,” I said, and saw part of his head nod.

A moment later he came back into the living room, and strode across to join me. “That’s the problem,” he told me.

“The problem is that I can see the bedroom?”

“No, the problem is why you can.”

He indicated a chair, so I took it, and he did a double take at my hair. His lips quirked. “What?” I said defensively, my hand going automatically to my new do.

Only to be slapped away by a tiny claw, because they were damned if I was going to mess up their handiwork. I looked up, going a little cross-eyed, and bit my lip. I wondered how, exactly, you got them out? I mean, I liked the style and all, but I was going to need to wash my hair sometime—

“Cassie.”

I looked down to see Mircea leaning over the desk to do something to my hair. Suddenly, my curls were falling around my face again, and the little golden creatures were on the move, trailing back down my neck and arm. And into a black case that I must have accidentally brushed with my hand at some point without realizing it.

I barely realized it now. Because Mircea hadn’t moved, putting him close enough that I could see that I’d been wrong. His eyes when his power wasn’t up weren’t brown. They were cappuccino and cinnamon and gold, with a few flecks of deep green, hedged by thick black lashes any girl would have envied.

And plenty probably had, I reminded myself harshly. Because my body was already responding to his nearness, his scent, his breath on my face. He hadn’t come any closer, but he hadn’t sat back down again, either, and for a moment we just stayed like that, unmoving.

And then his lips touched mine and I jerked back, furious with him, and even more so with myself. Damn it all, what did it take?